Artists against the Iraq war

Young painters and sculptors join the Vietnam generation to produce works following in the footsteps of Goya and Picasso

by Peter Beaumont

It has inspired films, songs and writing. Now the war in Iraq is inspiring fine artists in numbers, perhaps, unprecedented in any war in history.

In studios from London to San Francisco, artists are struggling to interpret images of the world’s most highly publicized war, in sculpture and canvasses, photographs and collages. And although artists responded slowly at first, the past 18 months has seen an explosion of art criticizing the conflict.

It is a sudden flowering of powerful protest art that has brought together artists of an older generation who can remember Vietnam, and a younger generation that on the whole has shied away from overtly political art. It is not just di Suvero who provides a link. The American collagist Martha Rosler has reimagined the work that she produced in the Sixties addressing the impact of the war on the home front, while Gerhard Richter, one of Germany’s most important living artists, has also tackled the war in a book of collages entitled War Cut.

‘It is a testimony,’ Botero said. ‘I became obsessed with the paintings, spending 11 months doing nothing but work on them. When the first images emerged of Abu Ghraib I was so shocked that a country that presents itself as the model of human rights could do this. It is like a permanent accusation. In that respect art is both weak and strong.’

And although selections from among the cycle of paintings have been shown in New York and Berkeley to good reviews, he is uncertain of the reception something so directly critical of the US will get in Washington, a very different city.

The curator of that exhibition, Jack Rasmussen, admits that he was surprised by the relatively slow response by artists to the war, particularly in Washington. ‘I think there is a sensitivity among artists to the risk of producing not art but political posters. I think people have felt it is not going to help their career, because it runs counter to prevailing trends in art. But people are now taking the risk.’ …

And after the Botero exhibit, Rasmussen has two other exhibitions scheduled for next year – a presidential election year as he points out – that sees artists invited to respond to the war, using Goya’s cycle, Disasters of War, as a starting point.

Mark Sladen, director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, who organized the Memorial to Iraq show earlier in the summer, has also been surprised at the slowness of artists in addressing Iraq, but now believes the conflict is inspiring an important transformation in the art world.

‘One of the things that motivated me to do the show at the ICA was I felt the art world had been strangely quiet. I think there has been a bias against work seen as illustrative and dogmatic. It seems to me that situation is unfreezing and people are finding ways to express political issues that are not oversimplified.

Perhaps the most famous of all works of art depicting the horrors of war. The work commemorates the attack by German bombers on the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937. A supporter of the Republican cause in Spain, Picasso began work on the huge mural barely a week after the bombing. The painting has since become an iconic work to anti-war protesters and was the site of vigils during the Vietnam war. Like Goya’s series, it is much mentioned as a source of inspiration to other artists.

Amnesty Film Shows Agony of US Detention Techniques in Iraq etc.: here.